I am not arguing that what the Bush administration did was inevitable … – Megan McArdle
Well, it sure sounded like that’s what was being said, given that the question that began the discussion addressed the claim that “war crimes are an inevitable byproduct of war”, and that the response to it involved saying things like this:
The point is that when you choose war, you choose war crimes–and that this is true regardless of why you are choosing the war. You may be going to war for reasons that even the staunchest of libertarians would support, like defending your territory from violent attack. Just the same, if the war grinds on for any length of time, you will get people violating the Geneva Conventions, doing obscene things to enemy soldiers (dead and alive), and launching attacks that would horrify the population if they were watching a third party do them.
… and this:
The point is, these things are part of the cost of war, not of the cost of “wars started by the Bush administration” or “wars with bad motives” or “wars we don’t like”. Sometimes, they are a cost that is worth bearing. Often, they are not, and if I were to consider whether to support a future war, I would weigh them heavily. But they should be weighed even if you think the war is just and right, because they will happen.
(The boldface emphases are mine.) Larison’s interpretation was not, in other words, exactly unsupported by the text he was given to work with.
Inevitability is a strong notion, of course, and the fact that the war itself was eminently, um, evitable certainly seems to show a way in which the crimes that have taken place within it could have thereby been avoided, too. That said, I do think, for at least the reasons outlined here, that McArdle is wrong to insist that there is no link between an unjust casus belli and the likelihood of in bello criminality in the mayhem that ensues:
What the Bush administration has done has been a choice of the Bush administration. They did not have to make it, even after they had gone to Iraq. They could (and did) make those choices even before we went to war in Iraq; they didn’t stem from the fact this is a special, bad kind of war that requires torture in a way that other wars don’t. Torture is a tactic that works just as well (or as badly) in defensive wars as in other kinds. The decision to do it is not an inevitable outgrowth of invasion. Lots of defending peoples have committed atrocities against their invaders.
The proposal at issue is not, however, that a bad war like the present one requires torture, or that torture works especially well in wars of aggression, but rather that, as this blogger puts it in a comment on McArdle’s blog, there is a psychological link between the move to preemptive war and the turn to torture:
Glenn Greenwald’s point, if I’m understanding it correctly, was that the same mindset that led the Bush administration to pursue an “aggressive war” also led them to approve and possibly order the use of torture on detainees; they are two symptoms of the same moral disease. Greenwald is saying that these are bad people who intentionally have disregarded our laws and treaties because they found them inconvenient to their doing whatever the heck they wanted in the world in whatever manner they wanted to do it.
This is exactly right, though I think the point could be made a lot clearer by highlighting the fact that it’s not just the disregard for laws and treaties that greases the skids for the slide from preemptive war to torture, but also – and more fundamentally – the idea, shared by proponents of wars of aggression and “enhanced interrogation” alike, that it’s okay to hit them before they hit you. This isn’t to say that it’s impossible to execute an unjustly-begotten war in ways that respect the principles of jus in bello, only that the mentality that excuses the ad bellum injustice is especially likely to continue to permit similar things down the line. This is an empirical hypothesis, I suppose, but one that I’d expect to stand up pretty well to scrutiny.
UPDATE: This, from a frequent commenter at Eunomia, puts things quite well, too:
… the very rationale for the war – that we had to take extraordinary measures because “9/11 changed everything”, and the Cheny 1% Doctrine of Pre-Emptive War – that a state which bears even a 1% chance of a serious WMD threat to us should be treated as a 100% threat – of course led to this rationale being applied to the operations of that war, especially the use of torture. The rationale for torture is essentially the same – if we have even the slightest reason to think that someone has knowledge of attacks upon us, or our soldiers, we should treat it as a 100% certainty, and use whatever means are necessary to get that information, such as torture. This is the same principle you have stated – that the moral ability to wage a criminal war carries with it an increased ability to commit further war crime – but fills in the detail that is virtually unique to this government.
The legal basis for this war was that the US has the right to invade a country it deems even a potential threat somewhere down the line – 5, 10, 20 years perhaps. I’m not sure anyone else in history has been creative enough to offer this rationale. Once made, however, the same principle can be applied to a whole host of issue in the ensuing war, and in other areas of government as welll. This is why it is such a dangerous doctrine, and should be legally challenged at a war crimes trial – the only way to truly confront these issues and decide their legal basis in international law.
Of course, the real question is what institution has the balls to actually confront this issue and put the President and members of his administration on trial. Avoiding that, unfortunately, gives de facto approval to the rationale and all that follows from it, which includes the rationale for torture and other war crimes.
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